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Manufacturing

US manufacturing company Microtechnologies, which specializes in critical components for global industries, has opened a new production plant in the Terra Industrial Park, in Coyol of Alajuela, Costa Rica.

The new facility of 15,000 square meters marks the celebration of the company’s 20th anniversary in the country and represents a milestone of innovation within the country’s manufacturing sector.

The digital integration of industry, energy and logistics is gathering pace, with traditional boundaries between industries breaking down, productivity rising and new business models popping up like mushrooms. In April 2018, Hannover Messe and CeMAT will lend their combined weight to this trend and take Industry 4.0 to the next level.

In every smart factory scenario of the future, the starring roles will be played by two main factors: people and machinery. In order for them to achieve top performance, however, the power of digital integration will need to be leveraged to the fullest.

“The integration of automation technology, IT platforms and machine learning will take Industry 4.0 to the next level,” commented Dr Jochen Köckler, Chairman of the Managing Board at Deutsche Messe.

Open Mind Technologies, a provider of computer-aided manufacturing software, has partnered with Heidenhain TNC controls to provide exclusive first use of their new numerical control code-based simulation solution, hyperMill virtual machining.

The Connected Machining module allows networked Heidenhain TNC controls to be run from remote locations, a key component for digital production systems.

Inspecting the outer shell of an aeroplane sounds so mind-numbingly boring that it absolutely must be one of those so-called “3D” – dirty, dull and dangerous – jobs that robots are supposed to save us from.

The absolute tedium of closely inspecting every square centimetre of the surface area of, for example, a typical Boeing 747 – which is about 22,000 square feet – would inevitably mean that some tiny imperfections can be missed by human eyes.

The Chinese government may be encouraging domestic companies to develop more advanced technologies, but for now, the country’s manufacturers are turning to established industrial robot manufacturers abroad.

Japan, being one of the leading industrial robot manufacturing nations in the world, is expecting a 10 per cent increase in orders over the course of this year, according to figures released by the Japan Robot Association.

iQagent, app creator for industrial applications, has released iQagent AR for IOS on the App Store. iQagent AR is the next evolution of the award-winning app iQagent, first released in 2012.

This new version leverages Apple’s ARKit to allow off-the-shelf creation of persistent augmented reality scenes containing process data and resources from existing plant systems. Once created, the scenes can be accessed by other devices running iQagent AR.